VeinViewer Sticks It To Anxiety

By MARY SHEDDEN | The Tampa Tribune

 

For most adults, getting stuck with a needle is a necessary evil in getting a medical exam or donating blood. You suck it up as a nurse searches and hopes for a "good vein" on the first try.

The anxiety and pain I feel getting poked and prodded, however, is nothing compared to the emotions that well up as I watch the same procedure being done to my kids.

It's worst when they're sick. I still shudder at the memory of my then 7-year-old daughter, Julia, at the hospital with pneumonia. Dehydrated veins on a child weighing less than 50 pounds made inserting an IV more than heartbreaking for me. And it's a downright difficult situation for the professionals called on to heal. I sat on my hands and tried to look calm so Julia wouldn't be frightened and the nurses wouldn't throw me out of the room.

That kind of patient and parental anxiety is just one reason why the staff at Tampa's University Community Hospital is celebrating the newest addition to its pediatric unit. The LuminetxVein Viewer, purchased with a $35,000 grant from the hospital foundation, is dramatically changing a simple but traumatic procedure. At least one other local facility, St. Joseph's Children's Hospital, also uses the device.

The vein viewer, which rolls around on wheels and resembles a small X-ray machine, shines an infrared light onto an arm or leg below and projects a real-time image of the vascular system lying beneath the skin. The hands-free device's neon-green image guides nurses as they use the sense of touch to verify a vein's location. UCH nurses say it has reduced the need to try more than once to insert a needle.

"It's giving us a visual on the vein," says Shirley Darius, a pediatric nurse at the hospital, which already utilizes a decorative, child-friendly examination room to help reduce stress for children needing invasive procedures. Blood draws, IV therapy and the like are never conducted in a patient room.

The procedure room, which includes an examination table atop a big blue hippo, is stocked full of distractions such as toys, a TV and "Where's Waldo?" books. Before the vein viewer's recent arrival, nurses struggling to find a young patient's vein had to depend on a handheld device that required lights be turned off, rendering all those distractions pointless.

Pediatric nurse Monique Hikel says the new device immediately reduced the stress level in the procedure room. Parents, who sometimes are holding their little one as the needle gets inserted, need to be distracted and calm, too.

"If children sense the parent's fear, then we have a double whammy," she says.

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